Three months ago, during Passover, my friend Bebe and I strolled down Neve Shaanan Street in Tel Aviv.
Neve Shaanan has always been a noisy and colorful place — with blaring Mizrachi music, cafes and a dirty kind of wonderful. But after the Central Bus Station moved away several years ago, the area became grittier, more dangerous. It is now a center of Tel Aviv’s foreign worker population.
We reached the train station at around 8 p.m. She ran for her Akko train and I waited for the North Netanya train that would take me to the kibbutz home of my husband’s parents.
The next day at lunchtime, a suicide bomber exploded at a sidewalk falafel restaurant on Neve Shaanan Street, just where we had passed the night before.
I heard about the attack from Jerusalem’s Old City, where my family was touring. The news rippled through the holiday crowd of Israeli tourists –- cell phones ringing, strangers sharing information.
By all measures, we were close to the terror attack. But somehow, as we drove out of Jerusalem, listening to the news in Hebrew, we were still just people sitting in a car and listening to the radio.
My heart ached; but I wondered: How close must I be to feel that it’s happened to me?
Now it’s July and again we’re glued to the news. But this time we’re sitting in Milwaukee watching Israeli news via a satellite dish. And this time it’s not one exploded terrorist and distracted Israelis at cafes and restaurants.
This time it’s kidnapped young men — 21-year old Gilad Shalit, 26-year old Eldad Regev and 31-year old Ehud Goldwasser. It’s Kassam and Katyusha rockets. This time it’s not random terrorism in Neve Shaanan or at Machane Yehudah, the open market in Jerusalem. It’s not even Sederot, which has endured hundreds of rockets from the Gaza Strip since last summer’s withdrawal. Now it’s Haifa and Nahariyah, Tiberias and Merar.
This time, after the initial shock, part of me needs to hear all the painful details that draw it close. My sister-in-law, who lives in the Negev, tells me that her windows shake as Israeli planes head into Gaza.
And this time, Bebe tells me how the war has reached Avtalion, the community village where her house is just up the hill from mine.
Using the ‘safe room’
Avtalion is in the Lower Galilee — a pastoral spot on a hilltop maybe eight miles south of Karmiel. About six years ago, residents voted down a proposition to build a fence around the 66-family village. The message was clear: We will not fear our Arab neighbors; we are here to live in harmony.
But now, warplanes and helicopters cross the sky without respite, creating a constant drone in the air. Whining sirens warn residents to take shelter and my neighbors are finally using the “mamad” (safe room) that was built into each of our houses.
Even unflappable Bebe, who shopped in Arab villages during the second intifada when so many of us wouldn’t and who maintains a cool distance to political conflict, feels rattled.
When the rockets started falling, she told me, she didn’t believe it. “There’s no reason to hit Majd el Krum, the Arab village just beside Karmiel. It’ll just be a few days. [the Israeli Defense Force] and the world will not let another war break out,” she wrote in an e-mail.
More than two weeks and almost 3,000 Hezbollah rockets later, reality has changed. “I had to accept the idea that we are in a war, although no rocket has yet fallen on our place and though we haven’t had to flee. We are in a war but we can do nothing directly, apart from protecting our kids, our lives,” she wrote.
One night, as sirens sounded high and low, Bebe carried her three sleeping children — one by one — into their mamad. From a life of modern privilege, world travel and high-speed information access, she scrambled with her children into a shelter, afraid.
As I talk with her these days, I recall our recent stroll down Neve Shaanan, involved in our own little worlds — talking about love and travel and how it feels to shoot roots into the earth.
And then, in an instant, terror struck, near enough to ruffle our hair but distant enough to leave us to our buzzing lives.
In that same way, Israel is split in two, she tells me. In the center and south of the country, life runs at the same hectic pace. People are plugged in to the war but still engaged in the grooves of their lives. But the north is in a state of emergency.
I wonder: How close must one be to war in order to feel it, in order to really get it?
Like many of us, I’ve been reading and talking endlessly about this new war. Just as my mind stretches to understand one part of it, another facet emerges, another perspective rings.
I read those reports out of an obligation to know, but what I really want is the human story, the subjective, the rumbling windows, cancelled summer camps and stuffy bomb shelters.
This week’s issue is full of personal views on the war, including a list of Web sites and blogs that allow readers to peek through a window into the lives of real Israelis.
We at The Chronicle join with Klal Yisrael to mourn the dead, offer light to the suffering and pray for peace.
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